Absolute is a x86 Linux distribution based upon Slackware. It concentrates on "desktop" use so that it is ready for internet, multimedia, document and general home use as much as possible. Absolute is lightweight -- meaning 2 things: that it can run on on older hardware and that the OS interface stays out of your way.

It is version-compatible with Slackware so you can use almost any package from the same version of Slack on Absolute. It is what I use all da y, every day, and I am very thankful for Linux and Slackware and I hope others find benefit from my work on Absolute.

About the new RC:

Pre-release that includes fixes for slapt-get and wicd, addition of a control panel, centralizing control and eliminating the sometimes-confusing utilities menus. Big updates to Midori and inkscape on repositories (under /CD2). New theme, new logon, QT4 up and running several new applications along with QT4-based K3B. Overall a more cohesive look and simpler navigation. Wanted a release candidate so that 13.0 will not necessitate updates -- also wanted to have feedback on whether Midori is functional enough to become the default browser. (It uses about 1/3 the memory of Firefox in my tests.)

Very often I need a simple command line calculator to do some simple math for my accounting or economics classes. Usually I don't need anything more complicated than the simple arbitrary precision calculator bc. The bc is very intuitive to use, after you learn to set the precision used in calculations:

scale=5

This sets the precision to five digits. Unless you define the precision bc will default to integer results which would not provide especially precise results. After setting the precision, bc is very intuitive to use. For example:

For a couple of days, I thought I would write some more scripts for using Twitter on command line. After some googling, I discovered there was already a command line twitter client available that would completely satisfy my needs.

Twyt is available as a source package from Andrew Price's home page. Download first the tar.gz package from the download page and unpack it with tar -xvf twyt-0.2.2.tar.gz. Install the package with ./setup.py install.

Twyt is written in Python, so you need to have Python installed, as well. In addition, twyt depends on the python-simplejson. I was able to install it directly from the Ubuntu repositories.

During the last week, I've learned to use Twitter. Of course, there is not a lot to learn as Twitter is a really simple system. Consequently, it can easily be updated from the Linux command line without using any dedicated application or a bloated web browser. You just need to have curl installed on the system to use the following command: